Today we are talking about the Drupal Association Board, Its Strategic Initiatives, and The Future of Drupal with guest Baddý Sonja Breidert. We’ll also cover Advent Calendar as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/429

• Former member of Board of Drupal Association
• What does the board do
• How does the board operate
• Are there term limits
• How does someone get on the board
• Strategic Initiatives
  • Innovation
  • Marketing
  • Fundraising
• Now that you are no longer on the board what’s next
• CEO of 1xInternet
• How did you get started with Drupal

• Try Drupal

Baddý Sonja Breidert - 1xinternet.de/en baddysonja

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Ron Northcutt - community.appsmith.com rlnorthcutt

Martin Anderson-Clutz - @mandclu Advent Calendar

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to reveal content a day-at-a-time, in an interactive advent calendar? There’s a module for that.
• Brief history
  • How old: created less than month ago in Nov 2023 by listener James Shields, whose drupal.org username is lostcarpark
  • Versions available: 1.0.0-beta3 release, which works with Drupal 10.1 and newer
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained, latest release made earlier today
  • Test coverage
  • Number of open issues: 5, 3 of which are bugs, but all but one are now marked as fixed
• Usage stats:
  • 6 sites
• Module features and usage
  • James actually created a Drupal advent calendar a year ago, on his website lostcarpark.com. The idea was to showcase a new module every day, similar to advent calendars that provide a chocolate or a toy each day, hidden behind a cardboard door
  • James’ initial version displayed the content in a traditional calendar format, using the Calendar View module. What he really wanted, however, was a way to present the content using clickable doors to reveal new entries
  • The new Advent Calendar module provides a new view display, so you can configure what content type or other filters to apply, and use fields to specify what information to show
  • The module uses a Single Directory Component for display, hence the 10.1 requirement
  • There is also an “Advent Calendar Quickstart” submodule that sets up everything for you, including a content type, view, and 24 nodes to populate it for you
  • Each site visitor gets to “open” the door to new content as it is published each day. For authenticated users, which doors have been opened is stored as user data, and for anonymous users it’s kept in local storage via Javascript
  • In addition to this being an interesting module in its own right, the advent calendar James has created this year is also a community effort. He’s managed to enlist a wide variety of contributors to write about modules or aspects of the Drupal community that they’re passionate about, so it’s a great way to up your Drupal game. You can open a new door yourself every day at https://lostcarpark.com/advent-calendar-2023

Once again, welcome to Day 18 of the Drupal Advent Calendar. Today we are joined by AmyJune Hineline (volkswagenchick), who is here to tell us about the Mentoring Initiative.

I am AmyJune Hineline, volkswagenchick on Drupal.org. I have been mentoring in the open source space since 2017 and was folded into the Drupal Mentor Coordination team in 2020. I have the privilege of being a non-code developer and have always advocated that non-code contributions are as important to the project as code.

I started in Drupal mentoring by presenting a version of the First Time Contributor Workshop at the...

Welcome back to day 17 of the Drupal Advent Calendar, where Amber Matz (amber-himes-matz) joins us to talk about the new Help Topics module that is part of Drupal Core in the new 10.2 version just released!

What’s up with Help Topics?

I’ve been working on the Help Topics module since Drupal 8 days, when we got it in as a core experimental module. It’s been a long and winding road, and throughout this journey, I’ve been mentored as a module maintainer and experienced both the fun and not-so-fun parts of contributing to Drupal. We’ve worked over many years to get Help Topics to “stable” and we are...

Tags

• Help Topics

It's day 16, and time to open another door of the Drupal Advent Calendar. Today we are joined by João Limas (jolimas) to talk about cookies.

What are cookies, and why do we need them?

Cookies are small pieces of data stored on a user's device by a web browser while the user is browsing a website. The web server sends these pieces of data to the browser and then sends them back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server.

Cookies serve various purposes and play a crucial role in enhancing the user experience on the web. They are used to remember your preferences, such as your...

Tags

• Cookies
• Cookie Control
• Cookie Consent

Dear Readers,

It's that time of the year when everyone brushes off the cobwebs of the long 11 months to gather them in a corner of retrospection. We are searching out planners and diaries to create to-do lists, write down resolutions, and set goals, all while peering back at 2023 before we bid farewell.

In the grand narrative of the year, one acronym echoed across the globe, shaping industries and transforming the way we work: AI. And has it made my work easier? Certainly! It's no longer only about working hard but working smart. I sought the assistance of AI to write about Drupal, and interestingly, it offered me a story on Drupal in a very old-fashioned way.

"Once upon a time in the world of web development, an ambitious individual namely Dries Buytaert ventured into the creation of Drupal. Later, Dries along with a community of passionate individuals came together under the banner of open-source technology and their journey transformed Drupal into a powerful platform that empowered countless businesses and organizations to build and manage their online presence with ease."

Our world has expanded and contracted, all within the grasp of our fingertips. A robust online presence has become indispensable for the growth of any venture, and Drupal has emerged as a stalwart, now embodied in its latest iteration, Drupal 10.2. This update brings enhanced features, fortified security, and many opportunities for developers and users alike.

Milestones are not conquered in isolation; they are a testament to the collective effort. Hence, The DropTimes introduces a new segment dedicated to spotlighting the stories of organizations that embody innovation and unwavering commitment to the open-source community and Drupal. In the inaugural edition of Spotlight, we shine the light on SparkFabrik. Elma John, our sub-editor, combined SparkFabrik's rich history of success, open-source commitment, and vision for the future into a comprehensive feature.

In an exclusive interview by Kazima Abbas, Andrew Berry shares his experiences from Evolve Drupal Toronto, insights into Drupal's unique community spirit, and the story behind his contributions to Lullabot. Kazima also had the opportunity to correspond with Brian Perry, coordinator of API Client Initiative, to gain more insights about the initiative. The DropTimes was fortunate to publish Ignacio Díaz-Roncero Fraile's detailed overview of the Component-Based Design using Single Directory Components (SDC) in Drupal.

Fame often comes with a baggage of criticisms and opinions and it's not unlikely for people to have polarising opinions. Recently, one such demonstration occupied the front page of Hacker News, followed by a revisit by Dries Buytaert to a 16-year-old blog that announced his 16-year-old start-up, Acquia and I was able to capture the essence of that discussion into a recent article.

The program schedule for DrupalCon Portland 2024 has been unveiled, offering a comprehensive overview of the conference's daily activities. The Drupal France and Francophonie association has announced its eleventh DrupalCamp, which is set to take place at the Maison des Associations in Rennes from March 28 to March 30, 2024. Axess hosts a webinar on Drupal 10.2 Features & DrupalCon Lille Highlights on December 19, 2023. Also, look at the list of events that will keep the Drupalers engaged this week.

Meanwhile, after the announcement of Drupal 10.2, Adam Bramley has been appointed as a new co-maintainer in the Drupal Core. Drupal Association published blog posts announcing the addition of Lenny Moskalyk to the Drupal Board and progress updates on the EU Cyber Resiliency Act response.

There are more stories available out there. But the compulsion to limit the selection of stories is forcing us to put a hard break on further exploration—happy Drupaling folks.

To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Thank you,

Sincerely

Alka Elizabeth
Sub-Editor, TheDropTimes

The way people use the internet is changing, and they want websites to be faster, more personalized, user-friendly, and secure. The content on a website is crucial for its success. To keep up with the ever-evolving needs of customers, your business requires a web content management system (CMS) that fits the bill. When it comes to content-focused CMS solutions, Drupal for Large Organizations is the perfect fit. 

According to W3Techs, Drupal is the chosen CMS for 2.4% of all websites. It's not just for big enterprises; even small companies find Drupal development services to be a highly useful CMS. 

Authored by: Nadiia Nykolaichuk

We firmly believe that website accessibility is of utmost importance. Which is why we are kicking off a series of articles dedicated to the elements it cannot exist without. Of course, accessibility embraces a myriad of aspects, but we decided to choose some of the most essential ones and dig a little deeper into how each of them works. 

New in Drupal 10.2

The second feature release of Drupal 10 improves content modeling, block management, menu and taxonomy organization, and permission administration. New options to sanitize file names make it possible to clean up the names of uploaded files, and media item revisions now have a dedicated user interface.

Easier content management

10.2 improves the user experience for managing several types of content:

• Field types for new fields are visually listed instead of a simple select list. Settings for fields are now all included on one form.
• Menu items and taxonomy terms have a dedicated option to add a child item, which makes item placement easier.
• Media items now have a dedicated user interface to review and manage older revisions.
• CKEditor's language selector can now be configured to only show languages supported on the site.

More flexible block placement

A user interface has been added to show or hide each block based on the HTTP response status, so that specific blocks can be added or removed when the page is not found (404) or access is denied (403).

New built-in file name sanitization options

The functionality of one of the most popular contributed modules is now included in core! Replace whitespace in file names, transliterate text, convert to lowercase, and more.

Faster permission management

The permissions page now comes with a filter on the top to make it easy to find the permission you planned to adjust.

Performance improvements

Drupal 10.2 includes numerous performance improvements for content rendering and HTTP responses, as well as improved caching APIs.

Works on the latest PHP

PHP 8.3 was released three weeks ago, and Drupal 10.2 is already compatible with it.

Modern language feature: PHP attributes

Drupal core has started adopting PHP attributes, a modern PHP language feature, to provide better developer experience for plugin annotations. Contributed and custom code can begin adopting this improved API for their plugins, and Block and Action plugins can all be converted to the new API.

Built-in project news updates

To help keep you up to date with project news, the Announcements Feed module became stable and is now installed by default with the standard profile.

Developer experience improvements

Drupal 10.2 comes with a number of developer experience improvements:

• A PerformanceTestBase was added to support automated testing of performance metrics with support to send OpenTelemetry traces to an open telemetry endpoint.
• A new DeprecationHelper::backwardsCompatibleCall() method is available that helps write Drupal extensions that are compatible with multiple major versions at once.
• PHP Fibers support was added to BigPipe and the Renderer, which allows Drupal to potentially run different code while it's waiting for an asynchronous operation to return.
• Configuration validation was expanded to better support strict testing and make configuration form validation easier to implement.
• Symfony's autowiring support was adopted for services, based on PHP 8 attributes, making service creation easier.
• The HTML utility classes and filter system was updated to produce HTML5 syntax instead of XHTML.

Core team updates

Drupal is built by an open source community of collaborators across geographies and organizations. Maintainers assess the work of the community and decide when it's ready to commit to Drupal core. After a period as a provisional committer, Dave Long (at Full Fat Things) was promoted to a full release manager. Kristiaan Van den Eynde (at Factorial) and Adam Bramley (at PreviousNext) have also become core subsystem maintainers. Thanks for stepping up!

Want to get involved?

If you are looking to make the leap from Drupal user to Drupal contributor, or you want to share resources with your team as part of their professional development, there are many opportunities to deepen your Drupal skill set and give back to the community. Check out the Drupal contributor guide, or join us at DrupalCon Portland and attend sessions, network, and enjoy mentorship for your first contributions.

Government and public sector websites, powered by Drupal, play a vital role, serving as the virtual hub for a multitude of functions. These Drupal-based sites are not just informative platforms; they function as the digital town square—connecting people, facilitating business transactions, providing updates, and showcasing key attractions.

The responsibility of selecting the right content management system (CMS) falls on government officials. This decision comes with a low margin for error and high stakes. Government websites, designed with Drupal by a proficient Drupal development company, must fulfill numerous criteria, including being secure, scalable, engaging, and more. 

Drupal Commerce is a user-friendly system developed from tens of thousands of modules. It allows you to build a customized e-commerce store that meets all customer requirements. The framework source code is available to each customer, further simplifying use. 
Drupal 7 software was used to create Drupal Commerce. The developers have added essential features, including product management, a convenient shopping cart, fast checkout, and fulfillment. Also, this commerce platform has a built-in content management system, which some of the world's famous companies use. Let's explore the capabilities with our Drupal Commerce tutorial designed for beginners.